Idylls of the Tribe
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing IDYLLS OF THE TRIBE BY PEARL K. BELL On the assumption that literature cannot be both lucid and profound, many modern writers actively seek to mystify their readers. In the...
...She has been missing for several weeks, and Jake, for whom $10 is a fortune, doesn't at first bother to wonder why Schlifka is looking for the girl...
...the charlatan Brooklyn rabbi who has been jailed for pretending to have a miraculous crown that heals the dying...
...Amid this frenzy of literary aspiration, Miss Ozick sounds the warning that those who choose magic over the Name of Names, Apollo over God, will in Paradise be confined to "a cage for storywriters, who will be taught as follows: All that is not Law is levity...
...Everyone in "Usurpation" is some kind of writer—would-be, "promising," dead, young, old—lusting after stories and fame and prizes: the narrator...
...What an unbridgeable chasm there is between Miss Ozick's tumid gloss and the text itself, a conceit of supernatural whimsy and erudite allusion that jumps from a literary reading at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y to S. Y. Agnon's parlor in Jerusalem to the burned-out rubble of Brownsville's Herzl Street (once proudly named by Jews who long ago abandoned it) to an anti-Semitic corner of Paradise...
...Yet I doubt that the Mosaic burden of "Usurpation" would have revealed itself to me without the expository clues provided by the author...
...But this admirable discontent is poorly served by pomposity...
...or Yiddish in America," the remarkable story Miss Ozick published half a dozen years ago, about an unsung and unread Yiddish poet in New York who is being slowly devoured alive by his jealous hatred of Isaac Bashevis Singer...
...The boy has been in America for three years, and works as a presser in a clothing factory...
...Lushinski thinks he can confound history and outwit the devils of memory by burying in a forgotten basement of his soul the secret he is terrified to have known: He is a Jew, and he began running for his life at the age of six, when Hitler marched into Poland...
...The debts of history should not be paid with the coin of self-importance...
...One night the pimp Schlifka offers Jake $10 to let him know if Hannah Isaacs, the pretty daughter of a rabbi, shows up in his building, where she lives with her father...
...An uncommonly reflective storyteller and critic, she has come to believe that the conventional modes of realistic fiction are inadequate to the ethical questions raised by Jewish experience...
...And Auschwitz was so devised that, thanks to Zyklon B, not a drop of blood was made to flow...
...Its moral conundrums stubbornly resist Miss Ozick's attempts to stir them to life...
...If the creative imagination leads, as Miss Ozick suggests in her preface, to violation of the Second Commandment—the prohibition against idolatry—then Jews ought perhaps not to be storytellers...
...The next day she returns to Roman's empty apartment and kills herself...
...the ghost of the poet Tchernikhovsky...
...a smart-aleck goat who knows all the fashionable tricks of incoherence...
...What cumbrous ethical baggage this puzzling novella is made to carry...
...For the people of Israel had asked: "When will you redeem us...
...What is genuinely impressive about this too slender novel is Nissensen's unwavering command of its place and time—the redolent immediacy of the streets and the houses, the red coals steaming in the pressing irons, the herring and black bread, the El casting its somber iron shadow over the red-light district on Allen Street...
...So she has written in "Usurpation" a fantasy that questions fantasy, a story against storymaking spawned by a dread as ancient as Moses: that art is sacrilege, that stories are the idols of the mind's licentious imaginings...
...and God had answered: "When you have sunk to the lowest level, at that time will I redeem you...
...Auschwitz, with its toy showerheads, out of which no drop fell...
...Of course there were Jewish prostitutes and pimps on the Lower East Side...
...But when "Usurpation (Other People's Stories)," the most ambitious fiction in her new book, first appeared in an anthology, an intelligent critic found it incomprehensible, an example of "technique as mystification a sterile intellectual game...
...One can indeed believe it is all being remembered in old age by the troubled and sensitive boy who lived through that horrible summer when Hannah s father prophesied, over the corpse of his daughter, that the Messiah would soon appear...
...Who the demon is she claims not to know, although she hopes he is not "the Creator of the Universe, who admitted Auschwitz into His creation...
...Disturbed by the charge, Miss Ozick undertakes in her preface to clarify the purpose of "Usurpation...
...A piece of imaginative writing, she declares, "cannot carry suitcases stuffed with elucidation...
...But 1 find it hard to believe that the innocent daughter of a rabbi would in the early days of the century have had the sexual self-awareness that Nissensen gives to Hannah, or that her sexual awakening by a sadistic fist would have transformed her so abruptly into a prostitute lusting more for pleasure than money...
...In stark contrast to Cynthia Ozick's fiction, Hugh Nissensen's novel My Own Ground (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 182 pp., $7.95) is a brutal tale told with merciless simplicity...
...She seems possessed by a foul-mouthed, snarling dybbuk...
...But "we become what we most desire to contend with...
...I don't for a moment question the anguished depth of Miss Ozick's feeling about the Holocaust, or her courageous willingness to confront the imperatives that six million deaths inflict upon the living...
...Curiously, although Hannah is the tragic center of Nissensen's tale of degradation and evil, she is its least consummate character, and resists my strenuous will to accept her reality...
...An old man named Jacob Brody is remembering in 1965 the terrible events he witnessed in 1912, when he was 15, an immigrant orphan boarding in a house on Orchard Street...
...Unfortunately, Miss Ozick overpowers Lushinski with her stagey complexities, and "A Mercenary" reads like a dazzling set of variations in search of a theme...
...For all its capricious ingenuity and austere self-distrust, the novella is too schematic...
...In the title story, "Bloodshed," Miss Ozick more directly confronts an obsessive theme of her current work—the moral burden imposed upon every Jew by the Holocaust...
...Even the novella "An Education," the first story Miss Ozick ever wrote, included in this new collection, has the brio and fluid assurance of a natural...
...In the preface to Bloodshed (Knopf, 179 pp., $6.95), a collection of three novellas and a short story, Cynthia Ozick dissents from the cult of strenuous obscurity...
...And her prefatory remarks are offered with a portentous air that seems at odds with her powerful intelligence...
...Only later does he learn that Schlifka had for 10 days kept her like a captive animal in the room where he "greens" his girls, but she managed to run away and was taken into hiding by Roman Osipovich Kagan, a Marxist revolutionary...
...It is a tour de force of mockery and affection, ruthless observation and pity, written with the witty authority that often takes a lifetime to achieve...
...In her preface, Miss Ozick attributes the presence of the real gun in "Bloodshed" to "the demonic...
...He is a manipulative dissembler—a white ambassador for a black nation, a displaced person turned heroic adventurer—who diverts his world with a comically improbable persona...
...The gift for invention "can be a corridor to the corruptions and abominations of idol worship, of the adoration of magical event...
...From one he removes a plastic toy gun, from the other a loaded revolver...
...He is repelled by their severe devoutness and only reluctantly attends the evening service, where the rabbi suddenly commands him to empty his pockets...
...the Israeli Nobel laureate...
...But the rhetorical shape of her conviction has become too sententious and literary...
...It concerns the crafty diplomat Stanislav Lushinski, a Polish refugee whose wandering once detained him briefly in that speck of Africa he now represents at the U.N...
...There was no hint of moral flatulence in "Envy...
...Bleilip, a rationalist and skeptic, comes to visit a distant cousin in a new rural village being built by Hasidic survivors of the concentration camps...
...Why then, does Hannah compliantly leave this refuge on Schlifka's arm after he finds her, and become his whore...
...When Roman Osipovich storms the brothel to rescue Hannah, she is wanton and defiant...
...But the recent novella "A Mercenary," also reprinted here, suffers from calculated virtuosity, complete with an invented African language and religion...
...It is a story, she explains, about the dangers of storytelling, "the magic that kills...
...Gradually Jake begins to understand what Hannah meant when she admitted in describing how Schlifka had savagely plundered her body: "There were times, may God forgive me, when I loved him...
...The rabbi enigmatically comments: "It is the toy we have to fear," but Bleilip's intentions remain undivulged...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 8
